When you need to find out in which kind of spec you are during run-time, it's definitely possible. It's a lot easier in RSpec 2+.

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For example, consider this global before block where you'd want to run some code for specific specs only:

config.before do
  # stuff
  that_fancy_method
  # more stuff
end

RSpec 2+

If you want to run such a block for a specific type of specs, you can use filters Show archive.org snapshot :

config.before do
  # stuff
  # more stuff
end

config.before :type => 'controller' do
  that_fancy_method
end

If that's not enough for you, query your example's metadata:

example.metadata[:type]
# => "controller"

From an example itself or a before block, query self.class.metadata.

RSpec 1

Unfortunately, RSpec 1 doesn't offer such filters, and the helpful metadata isn't around either. However, you can still get something similar by looking at self.class.ancestors. For example:

config.before do
  # stuff
  that_fancy_method if is_a? Spec::Rails::Example::ControllerExampleGroup
  # more stuff
end

Find out if you are in a spec that knows about request and response

You can use the RSpec 1 approach to find out if your current example knows about RSpec's request and response, like helper specs or controller specs:

if is_a? Spec::Rails::Example::FunctionalExampleGroup
  that_fancy_request_thing
end

Note that you should not check via something like respond_to?(:request) since that would break horribly in specs that let(:request).

The example above is from RSpec 1 -- the class to check against might be different for RSpec 2.